Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire

Jeffrey Veidlinger

Publication Year: 2009

In the midst of the violent, revolutionary turmoil that accompanied the
last decade of tsarist rule in the Russian Empire, many Jews came to reject what
they regarded as the apocalyptic and utopian prophecies of political dreamers and
religious fanatics, preferring instead to focus on the promotion of cultural
development in the present. Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire
examines the cultural identities that Jews were creating and disseminating through
voluntary associations such as libraries, drama circles, literary clubs, historical
societies, and even fire brigades. Jeffrey Veidlinger explores the venues in which
prominent cultural figures -- including Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Moykher Sforim, and
Simon Dubnov -- interacted with the general Jewish public, encouraging Jewish
expression within Russia's multicultural society. By highlighting the cultural
experiences shared by Jews of diverse social backgrounds -- from seamstresses to
parliamentarians -- and in disparate geographic locales -- from Ukrainian shtetls to
Polish metropolises -- the book revises traditional views of Jewish society in the
late Russian Empire.

Cover

Contents

Acknowledgments

I have benefited enormously from all my colleagues at Indiana
University in the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program,
the History Department, and the Russian and East European Institute. In
particular, I am grateful to Matthias Lehmann, Ben Eklof, and Dov-Ber
Kerler for their thoughtful comments ...

A Note on Transliteration

This book discusses people and places that existed in multilingual environments.
Proper names varied depending upon personal inclination and
audience and were expressed alternatively in Hebraic, Cyrillic, and Latin
alphabets. Even within these alphabets pronunciation varied vastly, ...

Introduction: Jewish Public Culture

Speaking before the All-Russian Zionist Congress in Minsk in 1902, the
Zionist thinker Ahad Ha-Am (One of the People), the pen name of Asher
Ginzburg (1856–1927), identified two strands of national culture: objective
and subjective. He defined objective culture as “the concrete expression of
the best minds of the nation in every period of its existence” ...

1 The Jews of This World

In 1910, Jewish cultural critic A. Mukdoyni (Alexander Kapel, 1878–
1958) wrote of the “this-worldnik” (Yiddish: oylem ha-zenik) who
“takes advantage of and enjoys with great appetite all the pleasures
of life.”1 “The old generation with its great asceticism has died out,” he
declared “and a new generation has arisen, ...

2 Libraries: From the Study Hall to the Public Library

In 1918, Soviet Yiddish writer Yekhezkl Dobrushin portrayed a scene
enacted in cities, towns, and shtetls throughout the Pale as young
enthusiasts banded together to establish libraries. “It was not long ago,
ten years ago. A small-town young man established a Yiddish library. ...

3 Reading: From Sacred Duty to Leisure Time

In his seminal work The English Common Reader, Richard Altick suggested
new approaches to studying reading habits. In addition to compiling
statistical data on book publishing, Altick encouraged historians
to uncover the stories of how common readers selected their reading
material, ...

4 Literary Societies: The Culture of Language and the Language of Culture

Literary societies were the foremost means by which Jews in the
early-twentieth-century Russian Empire organized for cultural
activity in the public arena. They provided forums for community
discussions, defined and delimited the terms of public debate, ...

5 Cultural Performance: The People of the Book and the Spoken Word

When in 1972 the anthropologist Milton Singer recalled his earlier
travels through India in search of the “ethos” or “world
view” of the people of Madras as they adapted to the modernization
of India, he noticed “the centrality and recurrence of certain
types of things. ...

6 Theater: The Professionalization of Performance

Even before theater activists of the early twentieth century began
to see the theater as a mystical conduit to another world, the role
of theater on the path to cultural refinement and sophistication
was well established in this world. As Russian theater critic Ivan Ivanov
declared in 1899: ...

7 Musical and Dramatic Societies: Amateur Performers and Audiences

In the shtetls that dotted the Pale of Jewish Settlement and the Kingdom
of Poland, it often seemed as though every young Jewish man and
woman was striving to become cultured and modern. “My shtetl
longed for beauty,” wrote Moyshe Olgin in his nostalgic portrait of an
anonymous Ukrainian town. ...

Recent scholarship has acknowledged the dominant role that remembrance
of the past and evocation of history plays in public culture
and the formation of national identity. Nineteenth- and early-
twentieth-
century historians have often been credited with creating a
“usable past” ...

9 Public History: Imagining Russian Jews

The historians associated with the JHES regarded history as a tool for
advancing their vision of the present and disseminating research
about the past. Although they preferred to think of themselves
as contributors to a professional field that relied on scientific values, ...

Conclusion: This World and the Next

For the Jewish community of the Russian Empire, the Great War was
a battle between this world and the next. Fighting on the side of
this world were the innumerable relief organizations, international
aid societies, hospitals, soup kitchens, theater societies, literary groups,
artists, and ordinary people ...

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